London
edward.seckerson
Death comes in many guises but in this ingeniously devised Philharmonia concert he most definitely did not have the last laugh. That was for Shostakovich and a curiously ticking time bomb of percussion which first surfaced in his Fourth Symphony when Stalin branded him a renegade but which later became a kind of defiant titter trailing to eternity in his fifteenth and last symphony. That piece, oblique and puzzling but extraordinarily lucid too, might be regarded as the apotheosis of his most powerful weapon in life and death: irony. It begins in the nursery like a second childhood Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Currently finishing off the NME Awards Tour with Django Django and Miles Kane, this lot seem about as New Musical Express as it gets. Which is to say that, from a cynics perspective, their NME championing is almost off-putting. Given the recent history of such promotions, they were liable to be yet another retrogressive indie unit whose guitar sound is indiscernible from their peers or, indeed, multiple bands of the last two decades. And it’s true, the music on 180, named after the Lambeth venue where they had a residency, could have been made at any point between now and 1980, perhaps Read more ...
mark.hudson
Richard Wentworth is the eminence not-so-grise of British contemporary art. The perpetually youthful sculptor’s activities span an extraordinary range of eras and ideas: serving as a teenage assistant to Henry Moore in the Sixties; building sets for Roxy Music in the Seventies; kick-starting the New British Sculpture movement in the Eighties with Tony Cragg and Richard Deacon; masterminding the now legendary "Goldsmiths Course" which launched the YBA generation, alongside Jon Thompson and Michael Craig-Martin.Beyond all this, Wentworth is a tireless social and intellectual catalyst, a man who Read more ...
theartsdesk
There is much anguish in some quarters at the news that the BBC has axed The Hour, the Abi Morgan-penned series for BBC Two about the workings of a 1950s current affairs TV programme based at the Corporation's old studios at Lime Grove. A BBC spokeswoman said: "We loved the show [yes, clearly] but have to make hard choices to bring new shows through." The news came as a blow to producers Kudos, who had anticipated making a third series, and the company's chief executive Jane Featherstone was "sad and disappointed".Despite The Hour's cliqueish allure and platinum-plated cast, which included Read more ...
mark.hudson
Travelling through Canada by train – more decades ago than I care to divulge here – I bought a book of Man Ray photographs at Banff in the heart of the Rockies. I spent the rest of the journey with one eye on the majestic mountains, and the other glued to the luminous, edgy, ineffably stylish images of the American surrealist in Paris.Those images were pretty well-known then. They’re infinitely better known now. The "Ingres" woman with violin marks on her back (pictured below, Le Violon d’Ingres, 1924), the pale-faced Parisian beauty with the African mask, the solarised profile of Lee Miller Read more ...
carole.woddis
The walls of the staircase to the Finborough Theatre off the Earls Court Road are lined with framed awards. Downstairs for the umpteenth time, the café/restaurant has gone bust. But no other London fringe theatre has achieved such stellar success as this tiny pub theatre under the helm of its restless, irrepressible artistic director Neil McPherson, who has made a cottage industry out of discovering forgotten gems.This time, in cohorts with Tricia Thorns’s excellent Two’s Company, they’ve come up with an absolute charmer, John Van Druten’s London Wall. Van Druten’s claim to fame rests mainly Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Dagenham MC Devlin, who initially made a name for himself on the London grime scene, has often been called the British Eminem. This would, at first appear, to be a rather trite assessment, down to his being a talented white guy at the heart of a black scene, but on further inspection it holds a certain amount of water.The 23-year-old’s second album, following 2010’s amusingly titled Bud, Sweat and Beers, showcases pop suss, a tendency towards the operatic, a theatrical sense of self-mythologising melodrama, and dense, aggressive, pithy verses interspersed with melancholic, melodic choruses. Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Proving that laughter is the only sure-fire cure for the January blues, this year's London Comedy Film Festival took place over four days from Thursday 24th to Sunday 27th January. Known commonly and affectionately as LOCO, it once again showcased the best of comedy filmmaking from around the world, lined-up alongside a range of imaginative events - a programme seemingly designed to give the most depressing month of the year a well deserved kick up the arse.Giving the intriguing but daunting sounding "Laughter Yoga" a wide berth on Thursday morning, I opted instead for Thursday evening's BFI Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Period instruments demand absolute honesty from their players. Their sound is their personality - candid, quirky, eccentrically beautiful - but their soul is revealed in the spirit of the playing, where beauty is not skin deep and the expressiveness of phrasing in the strings is created in the bow arm and from a truthfulness of intonation that does not hide behind vibrato. Watching and listening to Sir Simon Rattle and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment realise Mozart’s last three symphonies was to experience some sense of their innate fantasy, daring, and sense of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
After seven years, Aled Jones is stepping down as presenter of Radio 3's Sunday evening programme, The Choir. During his stint at the helm of the 90-minute show, the ebullient Welshman has showcased choral classics ancient and modern, hosted choirs from Africa, Denmark and Fiji, and fronted a memorable special on Richard Rodney Bennett.Since apparently no single individual could replace Jones (yet), Radio 3 has lined up six special editions of The Choir, each of them presented by a notable name from the choral music sphere. Conductor Suzi Digby (pictured below), who specialises in working Read more ...
David Nice
With the cuts still to bite deep, it's enterprising business as usual for both of London’s biggest concert-hall complexes and their satellite orchestras in the newly announced season to come. I use the word "complex" carefully, because as from September, the Barbican Centre, which already has access to LSO St Luke's up the road, will also be using the 608-seater hall constructed as part of its neighbouring Guildhall School of Music and Drama’s Milton Court development.The Southbank Centre will soon be able to hold its head high about one reinstated asset which the Barbican Hall sadly can’t Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
A confession: for much of this debut album from London fuzz-pop fivesome The History of Apple Pie, I have little to no idea what vocalist Stephanie Min is on about. Sweet and half-whispered, floating above crunchy bass and tuneful guitar riffage, it’s almost as if her vocals are there for effect rather than having something to say.But it’s not like contemporary pop is underrepresented by sloganeering and cheesy rhyming couplets, and when the music is this good who cares? Ten giddy teenage anthems thudding to earth packed with lust, heartache and the need to dance all night, Out of View is a Read more ...